Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure | The Mozilla Blog
blog.mozilla.org
LAURA CHAMBERS, CEO, MOZILLA CORPORATION As Mark shared in his blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we n

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/23894598

Despite its emphasis on protecting privacy, Mozilla is moving towards integrating ads, backed by new infrastructure from their acquisition of Anonym. They claim this will maintain a balance between user control and online ad economics, using privacy-preserving tech. However, this shift appears to contradict Mozilla’s earlier stance of protecting users from invasive advertising practices, and it signals a change in their priorities.

    • parpol@programming.dev
      51·
      5 hours ago

      Also disingeneous to call it adding ads to firefox, because that’s also not what is happening. They’re trying to replace cookies with something better for our privacy, and them developing this feature will not impact any users who block ads or disable tracking cookies already.

      I think they should go ahead and make the feature so that people who don’t care about ads at least don’t get tracked.

      • youmaynotknow@lemmy.ml
        2·
        32 seconds ago

        They are not trying to “replace” cookies. This is effectively adding yet another way to track users. Sure, may not be as invasive as cookies, but this does nothing to remove or modify them either.

        Then there’s the fact thay they deployed this behind the scenes and did not mention it until they were called out.

    • pipariturbiini@sopuli.xyz
      484·
      6 hours ago

      I dislike ads as much as the next person, and find uBlock Origin necessary for browsing the web, but the cold fact is that the internet is run with advertising, whether you like it or not.

      If that is done without creating a profile on me, and without crippling the reading/viewing experience, I can tolerate advertisement.

      I assume this is also an action towards becoming independent from Google funding; which is a good thing.

  • flappy@lemm.ee
    64·
    3 hours ago

    So banning ublock origin lite from the addon store was malice, after all?

    That means they will drop MV2 as soon as Chrome ends the business/legacy support, since they were the alternative.

    • disguised_doge@kbin.earth
      12·
      2 hours ago

      I think the ublock origin lite thing was a legitimate mistake, though I understand Mozilla’s depleting benefit of the doubt.

      • melroy@kbin.melroy.org
        4·
        1 hour ago

        THe developer also don’t want to develop uBLock Origin Lite. Mozilla is sucking all energy out of people.

        • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
          11·
          26 minutes ago

          of course they don’t want, it’s such an inferior addon that it’s almost useless for privacy. it’s little besides just visually hiding ads. but that’s the best that can be done on chrome